


The Important Things In Life (For Instance, Bad Geometry)

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anyway Instruments and Sandwiches, Drabbly Thingy, I don't know, I'm kidding, M/M, Man You Can Tell From These Tags That I Got So Much Sleep Last Night, Music and Stuff, Oneshot, They Don't Have Locks, They Probably Should, This Is One Of Those Moments Where You Know The Music Building Should Check Their Locks, Weird Comparisons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 11:25:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1224499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A list of observations by John Egbert.<br/>...It indicates a lack of organizational skills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Important Things In Life (For Instance, Bad Geometry)

His fingers slip over the creamy smooth brittle-cold keys. There’s an ache in his chest like another person’s bruise and his fingertips seem to have turned to old leather.  
  
Piano keys seem like they'd taste like vanilla ice cream (they never do).  
  
They’re chilly and a little worn and after you’ve known them, touching anything else seems incomparable. This touch is the sensation of a water droplet dangling lower in gravity. A little pressure, and then magic would escape into the world. A breath, even. It would growl out menacing, mixing with his laughter as all the heavy, sticky parts of the day evaporated. He turns to leather and the updraft; he forgets to bleed internally.

\----

Karkat shouts across the room, and John thinks about touching him.

\----

Yes! He would bang against the keys and be sore later—he’d feel guilty about abusing the poor piano; gosh, there had to be a limit to how hard you were supposed to transcribe sounds into shivers of the air—but every time, he forgets to be careful. Each note hides a collision, an exclamatory crack, and an outpouring of _loudness._  
  
Want to know a secret? John has never played for the music, because the pretty-perfect-picket stuff is so boring it makes him squint. So he plays to make the world inch away from his pocket of sound until gravity lets him go, and he plays so that when he ditches the piano again, he’ll be carrying that roaring, those high notes, the lingering laughter right along with him, etched in his eardrums. It makes him deaf and he doesn’t care. He plays for the loudness.

\----

As Karkat bellows, John’s face is in his hands. Karkat hates to be laughed at, so he saves that for when the troll gets quieter.

\----

In the pauses between breath and bad ideas, he thinks of the band practice room. Way before he’d had a piano. Those tight, tiny rooms! Were they watching you? Was there no way to keep just anybody from opening the door? Thirty minutes of that felt like being strangled. Back then, ugh, so looooong. And so boooooring. Is it that time flows slower when you’re younger? And the rooms weren’t soundproofed at all, so feel free to share your mistakes. Cringe.  
  
Gosh, those rooms were horrible! Gray would wash out everything else, and the sickly light would make you want to close your eyes against everything but your own shadow, and the bench seemed to be made out of other people’s fossilized gum wads. In the middle of that, there slouched piano, gleaming like an alien thing. Big. That was the first thing John thought about it, the same way now he looks at one now and it seems so small. He’s seen the grands on TV, the ones you’d have to sell a car to get your fingers on, the ones that would never agree to be packed into a drab little cell, but demand an entire concert stage.  
  
Is it weird that John prefers the smaller pianos? He sits down, and he knows what to do. His fingers find the right keys, stumble—embarrassed, ugh, gosh, he just wants this to go right—but as soon as he finds the right rhythm, the world stops making sense in the best possible way. He forgets everything but the fact that he’s smiling. Why wasn’t he before he came in? How silly! Who could forget to smile?  
  
Never mind, forget it. He’s kind of busy right now.

\----

This room on the meteor is clearly the worst place John has ever been in—it’s either made of mold or puppy dog tears—which is easy to reflect while Karkat types furiously into his husktop and growls like there is nothing in the room but the subject of his ire.

\----

Sheet music is for wimps. John likes to keep clear of the beaten track.

\----

To make him jump, John shouts, “Hey Karkat!” To his delight, the troll swears at him.

\----

He knows to take care of the pianos too—for every hour spent blasting his sound through the atmosphere, there’s the time that must be taken to tune. Check the strings, the keys for damage. Apply polish, wipe away the fingerprints you didn’t mean to leave. Clear off the bench (again. Why is he so messy?). And the moment where his palm rests against the glassy body of this machine, not anywhere near the keys (push-react-shout) just paying his silent thanks. Why, how do you do it? He worries, a little bit. That he might be doing this wrong.  
  
He runs his eyes over it and wonders how, and in what unfathomable thought process, a piano might be born.

\----

By lunchtime, Karkat is done being angry and slaps something horrific-looking down next to John’s turkey sandwich. John pretends to gag and pokes Karkat’s shoulder without saying anything. Karkat threatens to make him try troll food.

\----

John heads for the door eventually, because he has things to do. Important, vital things, the collection of problems that now seem so much more worthwhile with echoed fury in his head and shivers still in his spine, making him care just as loudly. He thinks that someday he will spend all day here. Someday, John will crash his way through the unintentional music and when it makes the important things more important, he’ll grin and realized that _today_ —this is officially the most important thing in the universe. And he doesn’t have to go _anywhere._  
  
But not today, not yet, not quite. He still has things to do.  
  
He gives his piano one last, lingering look. He cannot quite believe it is there. Some things never fade out of their initial shocking stages.

\----

_Karkat is…?_ John ponders as he walks away. Huh. There’s no parallel, is there?

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my good golly gosh on a pogo stick GUYS my life sucks so much right now. I. Don't even. There are not words, okay? I'm not sure if this is one of those moments where I should be regretting poor life decisions or checking the water for stupid drugs, but by all things fucksockian, I am in deep shit.  
> Translation: You guys are getting nothing but prewrites until I stop inching closer to the doom of my career and having to eat ramen out of a cardboard hut for the rest of my days. Sorry bout that. Star Trek and Night Vale people who are crazy enough to read this post, errrrrm, I am sorry. There were no prewrites during the hiatus. Which was pretty much why there was a hiatus. Sorry, I'll get back on that when my existence stops trying to murder me.  
> Also, updates are tentatively heading to Thursdays, which is when my life sucks slightly less because it's almost the weekend, but also isn't Friday which is a black abyss of Why Do I Do This To Myself. Expect me to miss days. But I will probably post on the weekends, growling about how much I need a brain transplant and lamenting the lack of time I have to write.  
> Er.  
> So, this rant might have been better served not in a oneshot drabble, but who cares! I am a wuss, and I'll just hide over here and hope that no one finds me.  
> And to the gentle, deeply confused souls reading this who have not the faintest fucking clue what I'm squalling about, just know that you are safe behind locked doors and have no need to fear small to medium-sized fish.  
> This fic was inspired by the wholesale brilliance of Dandle Pedal Moil Coddle, an infinitely more spectacular work of writing. You are doomed to a wretched and lonely existence if you do not go read it.  
> Farewell!


End file.
